10 things you can do to starve the Wall Street beast

[I personally am doing everything I can to starve the beast, and always on the look-out for new ways. As someone says in the below article, you can either have enormous quantities of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or you can have democracy, but you cannot have both.

Wall Street serves no productive purpose for the vast majority of Americans. It does not “produce” anything real. It does not create anything real. It is merely a rigged system by which wealth generated by the productivity of hundreds of millions of hard-working people is funnelled into the pockets of a tiny, tiny percentage of the Super Wealthy. We the People have been robbed (see the numbers below, comparing distribution of income in the 1980’s to today). Can that be turned around? Maybe. But meanwhile, there ARE things that you and I can be doing every day to reduce the amount of blood the beast is sucking from us.

Yes, the problems going on in this nation right now are huge, and seem overwhelming. But that does not change the fact that each and every day, you and I make choices with how we spend our money, and those choices CAN make a difference. See how many of the 10 tips below are ones you already subscribe to, or which you can switch to.

Many of these ideas you’ve probably heard before, but #10 is new. And thought-provoking. Has domestic surveillance become the new cash cow for the corporatocracy? Think about it. As the famous line from the movie WATERGATE said, if you want to understand the why’s and wherefore’s, “follow the money.” -DB]
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10 Things You Can Do to Starve the Wall St. Beast and Grab Yourself a Piece of the Pie

We must put the wealth back into the hands from which it was taken in a rigged wealth transfer scheme.

Dialogue on the economic crisis has focused on symptoms: bailouts, corruption on Wall Street, collapse in housing prices, intractable unemployment, Federal Reserve monetary policy. Most people have been socialized to silence on the topic of the disease itself: debilitating wealth concentration. We hear little on the overwhelming argument that wealth concentration is the root cause of the lingering crisis because within milliseconds of the words escaping into the public arena, screams of “Socialist! Socialist!” proliferate; an army of right wing talk radio buffoons fill the airwaves with dire warnings of the growing communist threat of wealth redistribution; Rick Santelli spazzes out on CNBC; and the Tea Partiers figuratively (or literally) stomp on us.

The people who scream the loudest aren’t the super rich who control the wealth; they’re part of a labyrinthine network of hired hands who function as high pitch bodyguards for the wealth hoarders. The actual super rich are the folks who appear on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans; people like Charles and David Koch, each worth $21.5 billion, who create multi layers of front groups, like Americans for Prosperity, to make it not only socially acceptable to hoard wealth but social nirvana. The Kochs hold secret confabs with their wealthy friends once a year, fingering their worry beads and plotting to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, lest they become number 6 on the Forbes list of billionaires instead of number 5. This, while 43 million of their fellow Americans live beneath the poverty level; including one in every 5 children.

David Barber, Associate Professor of American History at the University of Tennessee, is not afraid of the cacophony from the wealth hoarders’ cabal, writing bluntly about the dangers of wealth concentration. In response to an email query last week, Dr. Barber said:

American society’s fantastically skewed distribution of wealth stands as one of the main structural fault lines underpinning the Crash. America’s richest one percent of the population own over forty percent of America’s wealth — exclusive of home ownership — in this, the most opulent society history has ever known. On the other hand, the bottom sixty percent of Americans own approximately one percent of all of America’s wealth. Maintaining the Bush tax cuts for the rich only perpetuates a part of the contradiction which brought on the present phase of the world economic crisis.

Dr. Barber’s statistics come from a study conducted by Edward N. Wolff for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in March 2010. Other findings from that study include the following:

The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11 percent.

In 2007, the top 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of all stocks; the top 5 percent owned 69 percent; the top 10 percent held 81 percent.

Debt was the most evenly distributed component of household wealth, with the bottom 90 percent of households responsible for 73 percent of total indebtedness.

Wealth concentration in too few hands while the general populace is saddled with too much debt to buy the goods and services produced by the corporations, in whom the wealthiest hold 81 percent of the stock, is a replay of the conditions leading to the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. (The Social Security system was borne out of that debacle. This time around, the wealthiest hope to use the funds from the bottom 90 percent flowing into the Social Security trust to prop up stock prices for the benefit of the top 10 percent. Any action today which postpones the inevitable process of more equitable wealth distribution, such as privatizing Social Security or retaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, will simply hasten the onset of more economic pain which will broaden out to devour the wealth of the upper quintiles through deflation.)

Writing in his book, “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner explained the situation leading up to the depression of the 1930s:

The national flood of income was indubitably imposing in its bulk, but when one followed its course into its millions of terminal rivulets, it was apparent that the nation as a whole benefited very unevenly from its flow. Some 24,000 families at the apex of the social pyramid received a stream of income three times as large as 6 million families squashed at the bottom — the average income of the fortunate families was 630 times the average income of the families at the base…And then there was the fact that the average American had used his prosperity in a suicidal way; he had mortgaged himself up to his neck, had extended his resources dangerously under the temptation of installment buying, and then had ensured his fate by eagerly buying fantastic quantities of stock – some 300 million shares, it is estimated – not outright, but on margin, that is, on borrowed money.

In both eras, Wall Street ceased being an allocator of capital to worthy enterprises and became an institutionalized system of rigged wealth transfer. The primary artifices this time around included issuing knowingly false stock research; lining up large institutional clients to buy at predetermined prices (laddering) on the first day of a new issue of stock – this made the price appear to soar and thus sucked in the small investor; threatening to take the stock broker’s commission away (penalty bid) if the broker let the small investor take profits in the newly issued stock – the practice was known as flipping and was reserved for the big boys. When the tech mania went bust and the rigged game was revealed, the small investor left in droves. Wall Street, with the Fed’s able assistance, fueled the next bubble – housing – and crafted complex derivatives to turn this market into a cash cow for Wall Street and foreclosures for Main Street.

The January 21, 2010 Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to have staggering financial influence in our elections (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) and the November 2, 2010 results of the midterm election should send a bone chilling message. Help is not on the way. The end game of this massive wealth concentration is long-term deflation, economic misery and multiple generations who will look back on us as the hapless society who couldn’t tame the Wall Street greed machine for want of a plan.

Thinking Americans can no longer wait for politicians to save us. When a dedicated public servant like Senator Russ Feingold from Wisconsin is unceremoniously tossed out and a billionaire-financed Senator like Rand Paul from Kentucky is sworn in on a so-called populist mandate, the baton for economic salvation falls to the individual. I offer below ten ideas to get started on the first course of starving the Wall Street beast. And, just to be clear to those perched on the edge of their seats preparing to scream “Socialist!,” I’m not suggesting “redistributing” wealth; I’m suggesting putting the wealth back into the hands from which it was taken in a rigged wealth transfer scheme.

(1) Shorten Your Home Mortgage: Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis summed it up: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” The Wall Street beast is thriving on interest on our debt and using it to hire lobbyists and fund politicians who will work for their interests, not ours.According to March 31, 2009 data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, four Wall Street behemoths control 35 percent of all the insured bank deposits in the U.S. and 46 percent of the assets (although the quality of those “assets” is very much a subject of debate). Those firms are: Bank of America Corporation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup, Inc. That leaves the other 8,242 FDIC insured banking institutions to share the balance. The total domestic deposits were $7.5 trillion with total assets of $13.5 trillion as of March 2009. That is far too much wealth concentration in too few hands as we’ve sadly learned from having to bail out those four institutions.Seek your accountant and/or financial advisor’s advice about converting your 30 year mortgage to a 15 year to move wealth from the bank’s shareholders pockets to yours. Rates have never been more favorable for such a move. Typically, over the life of the loan, you will save tens of thousands of dollars of interest. You can look at the savings for your specific situation by clicking on the mortgage calculator at www.bankrate.com. (I’m not endorsing any of the bank loans offered at this site since I haven’t done any research in that area; I’m just suggesting the use of the mortgage calculator.)Talk to your children before they buy a home about the interest differential between a 30-year and 15-year mortgage over the life of the loan. Show them how to use the mortgage calculator.

(2) Think Local: Consider moving money as it becomes liquid out of the big Wall Street banks that have an iron grip on your Congress and moving it into FDIC insured certificates of deposit at your community bank (being careful not to exceed the insurance limits). A good rule of thumb is to ladder maturities to coincide with when you will need the money. Again, you should consult with your accountant and/or financial advisor. This will also help provide loan funds to local businesses and residential housing in your area.

(3) Start a Business: Don’t worry about the possible arrival of the pink slip; be proactive. Start a business on the side. Do well by doing good: what product or service can you provide that a struggling consumer wants and can afford. (Ideas might include: debt counseling, low cost child care, foreclosure counseling, a pick-your-own fruit and vegetable business if you own farm land, consignment shop, home staging services to help with quicker resales.)

(4) Invest Wisely: Get smart with your 401(k). Investing in the S&P 500 is simply feeding the beast; the beast that’s using your cheap capital to hire lobbyists, create PACs and separate you from representative government. Some 401(k) plans allow you to roll over 50 percent or more to your own IRA after reaching a certain age. Call your benefits office and find out what your options are. Speak to your accountant and/or financial advisor before making any move. You may also want to consider opening an IRA at a community bank and buying insured CDs as an alternative to putting more funds in the 401(k).

(5) Check Out Credit Union Membership: Do you have a family member that belongs to a Credit Union? Chances are they can get you an account there. If you need to use a credit card, try to get one through the credit union at a reasonable rate and then cut up any high-rate card. It’s an outrage that some of the banks that required a citizen bailout are getting their money from the Federal Reserve at almost no cost while charging struggling citizens 20 percent interest.

(6) Don’t Use Credit Cards from Corporations That Abuse You: All of the following have one thing in common: Home Depot, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Macy’s, Sears, Zales. They all extend credit to their customers on a Citigroup credit card. Forty million customers are helping to prop up Citigroup and its anti-consumer, anti-citizen practices by using these cards. Citigroup makes its workers sign away their rights to go to court (see number 8 below) and has serially abused investors through corrupt practices.

(7) Brand Attacks: Chances are high that your local storeowners don’t have a PAC and lobbyists on K Street working against your interests? Reward them with your business and starve the S&P 500 firms until they get the message: if you want me to honor your brand, honor my right to representative government.

(8) Return the Courts to Workers: Many of the largest corporations force workers to sign away their rights to the Nation’s courts as a condition of employment. It’s called mandatory arbitration and it’s an unfair process that is rigged to favor the corporation. If you interview for a new job, ask if the company has such a policy and walk away if they do.

(9) Complain: Don’t let shady practices go undetected. Write a detailed report and file it with the appropriate body: local district attorney, state attorney general’s office, consumer protection groups; and write a letter to the editor to the local paper. This helps good businesses prosper and starves dirty businesses of customers.

(10) Just Say No: To frontal nudity photographs/skin radiation/genitalia groping; all just to board a plane. Don’t fly. You will be standing up for civil rights and starving Wall Street. Body scanner companies trade on Wall Street and the banksters are hoping domestic surveillance is their new cash cow.
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Ilargi: Long day today, driving to Oxford to attend a Robert Prechter lecture, thinking Max Keiser would post a Stoneleigh interview, working on the Stoneleigh DVD-Rom that should be available within a handful of days barring divine intervention, and all that with only intermittent web access.

Funny to see that nobody talks about California or Illinois for a while, as Angela Merkel has grabbed the international media headlines with her solid bid to bring down the euro vs the USD through a series of carefully planned rumors and the stand and/or deliver execution of Ireland. It doesn’t look like what happens in Ireland could have been avoided, the place looks more like Iceland every day, but you still feel to feel for the Irish people. Word is that the total bailout costs are moving towards the €200 billion level (their budget cuts are €15 billion), and that’s for a country of 4.5 million souls.

Well, at least they won’t be alone in that predicament much longer. As in when California and Illinois will be in the spotlight again. Or Spain, which some have apparently suddenly figured out is also still as doomed as it always was. It’s not a bad thing to follow the news and fads of the day, but it’s still not very wise to lose track of the underlying theme: no matter what bailouts and stimuli are concocted by those wishing to hang on to their seats and fat wallets, more debt doesn’t solve debt problems.

Debt always has to be paid down, restructured or solved through some combination of the two. For now, the negatives of both options are laid squarely on the shoulders of the people of the various afflicted nations, instead of on those of the folks who incurred the debt. It seems unlikely that this will continue much longer. Surely, there must be one nation where enough voices can come together to say: no mas?! So far, little action. Protests in Britain, Ireland, Portugal, but nothing anywhere near massive. Nothing that even seriously disrupts an economy or society.

I saw some footage early this morning on BBC that sort of says it all. The news presenters compared the student protest marches outside yesterday with those inside, some sort of sit-down. The latter were praised for being peaceful, the former derided for being violent. Which they weren’t really, there were just the odd few token people who threw stuff, a few among many thousands who just marched. And those few could easily have been paid to throw that stuff by the government. The message being that both the BBC and the government had rather see you sit in a room than march on a street. Much easier to control.

As long as we don’t escape that sort of controlled environment, nothing will happen. It’s all about the difference between a financial crisis, which most people continue to believe this is, and a political one, which it actually is. This crisis is entirely political because, for instance, politicians don’t protect their electorate from predatory institutions and practices. Because those predators are the ones who have the real political power (re: campaign finance). Because, see Ireland, banks and their stockholders are still being made whole on their losses, without restructuring, without haircuts, at the cost of the people. Who still have no clue what is going on. It would be a good thing if that would change. A very good thing. For you. For your children.

Where do you think the €100 billion or so -or more- involved in the Irish bailout ends up? This money is used to pay off the gambling debt of Irish bankers to global banks, to Deutsche, Société Générale, and eventually to the same Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan that are in the center of all these miserable stories all over the globe. That is what has to stop. And until that happens, it makes no difference who you vote for in your elections, no matter where you are.

And if anyone tells you it’ll all be alright, you just ask them what they suggest we do with the debt. Shoveling more and more into your own kids’ graves doesn’t sound like a great idea, so why do you do it?. You’re not going to change this one with a sit-down protest.
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Feeds: Mendo Island & Independent News

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Hundreds of corporate giants have rallied to urge governors to see the upcoming regulations as a boost for the economy.By Katherine Bagley Three hundred sixty-five companies and investors sent letters on Friday to more than two dozen governors supporting the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to significantly reduce carbon emissions from power plan […]

(Houston Chronicle)Shell launched Arctic drilling on Thursday by sending a specialized bit spinning into the bottom of the Chukchi Sea, as critics protested against the campaign. The company now has until Sept. 28 to drill the top portions of up to two wells at its Burger prospect about 70 miles northwest of the Alaska coastline, but after fixing a damaged i […]

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is proposing an interstate compact to defy federal law and "shield" states from the EPA's imminent Clean Power Plan.By Naveena Sadasivam With the Obama administration poised to issue its sweeping rules to cut carbon pollution from power plants, a Texas-based conservative think tank is making a far-fetched bid […]

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who thinks atheists are missing out because we don’t have cool hats like other religious people, says there are some Protestants who believe in a childish version of faith… [According to atheists, religious people] are also supposed to believe in a God who answers prayers here below and gives us goodies if [Read More...]

This is a neat project.Matt Cubberly wrote a book introducing children to evolution via poetry and neat illustrations by May Villani. It's called Evolutionary Tales and they're raising funds for it on Kickstarter:

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

What is not worth doing, is not worth doing well. ~Abraham Maslow

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

Zeno Stoics

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~ Cicero